Warm Words & Otherwise: A Blizzard of Book Reviews

by John Grant

  The Last Harbor is in its way a very quiet book, but it is also a very powerful one. And a wonderful one.

  —Infinity Plus

  Fitcher's Brides

  by Gregory Frost

  Tor, 398 pages, hardback, 2002; foreword by Terri Windling

  This superb novel is one of the Terri Windling-edited Fairy Tale series in which writers recast traditional tales. In this instance, Frost combines Bluebeard and Fitcher's Birds to produce a fantasy that's very much more entrancing than either.

  It's 1843, and charismatic preacher Elias Fitcher claims the world is about to end; all except those who come to dwell in his utopian community in the Finger Lakes region of New York State will be forever damned by a vengeful Lord. Among the families suckered by this nonsense are the Charters: mom, dad and their three lovely daughters, Vernelia, Amy and Kate. Fitcher's eye first falls on the eldest sister, and she becomes his bride ... but soon disappears. Then it's the turn of Amy, and finally, of course, Kate is "favored." Kate, who's spunky and intelligent, succeeds in outwitting and defeating the vile sexual predator Fitcher where the over-sensible Vernelia and the flighty Amy have failed.

  This is exactly as you'd expect from a fairy tale. What you wouldn't have expected, though, is that Frost succeeds in turning his fable into a very full fantasy, in two principal respects. One of these is the long denouement, about which I ought not to say too much (for fear of spoiling) except that Fitcher proves to be very much more than the mere charlatanistic mortal he seems. And the other is Frost's creation of the bizarre, near-macabre supposedly utopian society itself. Jekyll's Glen seems, as you read, to be simply a rather strange community – well, what else might one expect from nineteenth-century religious nuts? Very subtly Frost reveals its further strangenesses, so that it's only after some considerable amount of acceptance of the plausible reality of Jekyll's Glen that you suddenly bring yourself up short at the realization that things are actually very odd. It's then that you look back and discover quite how much you've taken at face value that you shouldn't have.

  Frost's artistry is exemplary, and his tale-telling likewise. This is a dark and broody novel that'll hold you from beginning to end.

  —Crescent Blues

  Alone

  by Lisa Gardner

  Bantam, 336 pages, hardback, 2005

  Lisa Gardner at the top of her form has become one of the best of our current genre-thriller writers, and even when she achieves less than that she's still head and shoulders above many of her competitors. In Alone she doesn't attain the heights of The Survivors Club or even The Killing Hour (both discussed below), but she has nonetheless written a thriller of some considerable interest in that it's a sort of crossover between the genre thriller and the noir novel, coming complete with a femme fatale figure.

  This femme fatale is beautiful, sexy Catherine Rose Gagnon. A couple of decades ago, as an adolescent, she was imprisoned underground and repeatedly raped by the psychopathic Richard Umbrio; that she survived is the reason Umbrio was finally caught and put behind bars. More recently she has married the playboy Jimmy Gagnon, son of a prominent judge, and borne him their son Nathan. But Jimmy is a serial adulterer and drunkard, and abuses her.

  One night the Boston SWAT team is called to the Gagnon home; yet again the neighbors have reported the sounds of violence – gunshots, even. Massachusetts State Trooper Bobby Dodge is deployed across the street as a sniper, should the need for one arise. And arise it does: he sees Jimmy Gagnon apparently about to shoot Catherine, and fires first. But Jimmy's father, Judge Gagnon, does not take his son's death easily, and commences to use his very considerable power to hound Bobby on murder charges. And the judge also persecutes Catherine, trying obsessively to seize custody of Nathan from her.

  Meanwhile, Umbrio has been unexpectedly released from prison, and has begun a murder rampage. Yet these are not random killings: he has been hired to follow someone else's agenda. His ultimate target is the girl who escaped from his clutches 25 years ago, Catherine Gagnon.

  Both Bobby and Catherine are in their different ways alone against the world, and so naturally they gravitate toward each other. The only way they can hope to get themselves out of the legal quagmire the judge has cast them into is to delve into the complex of motivations driving the man's increasingly strident attempts to ruin their lives. For Bobby this means walking an emotional tightrope so far as his feelings for Catherine are concerned: on the one hand he is engaged in a torrid affair with her, and adores her; on the other he suspects her of merely using him as her puppet, and perhaps even of engineering the death of her husband.

  A welter of fine supporting characters help this story bubble along merrily. I particularly enjoyed Elizabeth Lane, the psychotherapist to whom Bobby is referred for counselling after the shooting; she too has her reasons for feeling alone. Susan, the girlfriend whom Bobby dumps in his infatuation for femme fatale Catherine, is likewise well drawn, as are Bobby's one-time lover and fellow cop D.D. and even the murderous Umbrio. What marks Alone as a lesser Gardner work is that there are a few plot twists so improbable that the necessary suspension of disbelief becomes hard to maintain; one of these in particular is completely gratuitous (the twist is irrelevant to the plot), artificial (it's only a twist because the author hasn't been playing fair with the reader), and consequently irritating.

  But, as noted at the outset, even lesser Gardner is better than much other genre-thriller fare, so Alone can certainly be recommended as a thoroughly enjoyable means of whiling away a few winter's evenings.

  —Crescent Blues

  The Killing Hour

  by Lisa Gardner

  Bantam, 324 pages, hardback, 2003

  There's a serial killer at work, but a serial killer with a difference!

  Yes, I know: you've heard that opening line before. But please bear with me. This one has an m.o. whereby he abducts two young women at once; one he kills immediately, but then he doctors the corpse so that (for anyone who can first realize his intentions and then interpret his cryptic clues) it acts as a pointer to the location where he has dumped the second abductee – alive, but in fiercely hostile territory and with an inadequacy of survival essentials. The woman who is "first victim" is thus the lucky one; so far all but one of his "second victims" have endured torturous deaths.

  The killer's stamping ground has hitherto been Georgia, but Georgia agent Mac McCormack has had an anonymous tip that brings him to FBI Headquarters at Quantico. Sure enough, the next "first victim" is dumped in right inside the Quantico grounds, where it is discovered by trainee agent Kimberly Quincy. Assisted by Kimberly's ex-FBI father and his lover, now running an investigations agency together, Mac and Kimberly have to do battle with inordinate amounts of FBI red tape and pecking-order politics as they try to identify the whereabouts of the "second victim" in time to save her life. What they discover is that this time the Eco-Killer – so-dubbed by the press because his motives appear to include a twisted attempt to draw public attention to endangered wilderness areas – has devised a riddle far more devious and far more ambitious in its scope than any he has set before ...

  So far so good – and the fact that this tale is told in Gardner's characteristically smooth and readable style helps proceedings along. With its notion of murdered bodies being adulterated to offer elaborate clues, The Killing Hour is almost reminiscent of those fascinating Golden Age detective novels by the likes of Ellery Queen and John Dickson Carr where the murderer is engaging in a complicated intellectual game with the detective; in such terms, Gardner's novel is every bit as engrossing as those precursors.

  But don't get the idea you're in for an old-fashioned entertainment of the Queen or Carr type. This is very much a 21st-century detection, with an engagingly feisty heroine to match. (That she should be attracted to McCormack, who seems to have more hands than brains when women are around, grates.) And the sufferings of the victims are not intellectualized into irrelevance, as would be the case in the traditional entertai
nment.

  Unfortunately, that pinpoints the eventual problem with The Killing Hour. Its literary precursors did not strive for realism – indeed, deliberately shunned it so the focus would be on the puzzle, on the game, with the plot being all the more delightful for its stark implausibility. Gardner's plotting in the later stages of this novel proves to be every bit as implausible; but because the telling relies on realism – her intent is to thrill, not just to puzzle – her denouement thereby comes as a profound letdown. A shame, because there has been so much before those final fifty pages that enthralled.

  An oddity. Internal evidence would suggest that Gardner's intention was to call this novel Heat Kills. Instead it bears the rather hackneyed, uninspiring title The Killing Hour. One wonders what went on there.

  —Crescent Blues

  The Survivors' Club

  by Lisa Gardner

  Bantam, 368 pages, hardback, 2002

  Jillian, Carol and Meg, although all beautiful, are three very different women – the first is forceful and dominant, the second is a bit of an emotional wreck, and the third is young and seemingly naive – but all share one thing in common: they have all survived an attack by the murderous College Hill Rapist. Together they formed the Survivors' Club and bullied the Rhode Island cops into intensifying the hunt for the rapist, with the result that Eddie Como has been arrested and charged with the crimes on the basis of a DNA match. As he arrives for the first day of his trial, however, Como is assassinated by a professional hit man who is himself promptly killed by a car bomb.

  Onto this turbulent scene comes state cop Roan Griffin, who is recovering from traumas of his own: he had a breakdown after, in quick succession, his wife died of cancer and a serial child-rapist and -killer he'd been hunting, David Price, proved to be the seemingly friendly guy next door. As he probes the two new killings Griffin becomes emotionally involved with the three members of the Survivors' Club, each in different ways, and with their families. Matters become rapidly more complex when the College Hill Rapist strikes again, once more leaving sperm traces whose DNA matches that of the dead Como. As Griffin delves he discovers that nothing – about the crimes or about the Survivors – is as it has hitherto seemed ...

  This is an extremely impressive mystery-thriller, enhanced by generally excellent characterization and sense of mood. Some aspects are of course predictable through the nature of the genre: Como was innocent, Griffin and Jillian are destined for each other, and so on. But these conventions serve to satisfy our expectations – which they do admirably – and are anyway more than compensated for by countless delightfully unexpected twists and turns of the plot. What's additionally pleasing is that Gardner isn't afraid to be pretty tough with the reader at times, unflinchingly presenting the sheer nastiness of violent rape; there's also a somewhat muted subtext about capital punishment.

  A couple of cavils, though. First, the mechanism whereby those DNA matches have been forged by the perpetrators seems very improbable. It may well be theoretically possible, but it seems so byzantine as to create a plausibility gap that even as good a writer as Gardner cannot bridge. Second, toward the end events enter a phase of Silence of the Lambs-like melodrama; that this should happen is inevitable as a consequence of the preceding plot – it's not gratuitous stuff – but again it makes the reader's happy suspension of disbelief difficult to maintain.

  These are, though, surprisingly minor criticisms when you're actually reading the book; it's only afterwards that they surface as discontents. All the rest of the tale-telling is so very good that you're prepared to forgive Gardner just about any lapse as you feverishly turn the pages ...

  —Crescent Blues

  Science Good, Bad and Bogus

  by Martin Gardner

  Prometheus, 412 pages, paperback, 1989

  Martin Gardner's book Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science (1957; an expanded version of his 1952 book Fads and Fallacies) is one of those rare books that I would recommend should be in the library of every intelligent human being. Dated much of it might be, but as an example of how pseudoscience withers under the spotlight of rational thought it is almost incomparable: it serves as a source of great entertainment but also as a warning to each and every one of us that we should examine closely our received ideas as well as some of our own dottier notions.

  Science Good, Bad and Bogus is, in a way, Gardner's very much later companion volume to that seminal work, and like it is drawn from essays written over the years. It's a much fatter book, and one's tempted to say that this is largely because of the amount of repetition in it; whereas in Fads he went to a certain amount of trouble to ensure the book was indeed an integral book rather than merely a retrospective, here he ... well, basically, he didn't bother.

  This actually does the compilation a great disservice. One can forgive anyone for harping on about their bêtes noires – Gardner's prime ones are Immanuel Velikovsky and Uri Geller – but constant repetition of that harping-on becomes at first merely tedious and then as maddening as being asked to watch a dead horse being flogged and required to applaud each and every time.

  His subject matter is of course a mixture of pseudoscience and the supernatural/psychic; in effect the supernatural/psychic becomes here a subgenre of pseudoscience, in that he approaches psychic claims from the viewpoint of experimental science. Thus, for example, while it is patent that he regards Geller as a charlatan-conjurer, he is more concerned with the deeply flawed investigations of Geller's claims by pseudoscientists and established scientists alike than with the full details of the trickery. This is actually a much more rewarding approach than the obvious one – attacking Geller's claims directly – and profoundly more educational. A recurring theme, and one that could well be carried over into our evaluations of more orthodox science, is that expertise and indeed genius in one sphere of human understanding should not be taken as any qualification at all for pronouncements in another. To continue with Geller as our example, we have much here on how a fine mathematician, John Taylor, was hopelessly deluded when he came to examine the supposed phenomenon of spoon-bending – not just by Geller but by a horde of gleefully cheating kids.

  About half the essays in Science Good, Bad and Bogus are extended book reviews, and in many ways these are even more revealing than the others. While a good number of the books he eviscerates have vanished into obscurity, all are, of course, still floating around in libraries and second-hand bookshops, and are thus continuing to delude the unwary. After each review, as per the other essays, Gardner includes a postscript, updating his comments as necessary and often citing the outraged letters received in the wake of the item's original publication. Again, these postscripts are especially rewarding in the case of the book reviews, for many of the authors have chosen to defend their work in extenso ... and sometimes they make a reasonably good fist of it, reminding us that we should be just as sceptical about sceptics like Gardner as about anyone else.

  This note leads to another mild criticism of the book. While my knowledge of the field is far less extensive than Gardner's, every now and then I had the feeling that perhaps an occasional baby was being flushed away with the bathwater. This sense was brought into sharp focus when I came across Gardner's assault on a famous joke of John Gribbin's. In Gribbin's clearly labelled exercise in wild speculation, White Holes (1977), he discusses tachyons, hypothetical faster-than-light particles which the mathematics insist would have to "travel backwards in time" (i.e., go the "wrong way" along time's arrow). In a spirit of self-mockery concerning all the quite serious (if, to repeat, wild) speculation that fills the book, Gribbin advanced the deliberately spurious theory that Gellerite spoon-bending might be caused by the audience's astonishment on sight of a spoon being bent releasing a burst of tachyons; said tachyons would then "travel backwards in time" to bend the spoon. It's not one of the world's greatest jokes, but it's pretty obviously a joke.

  Gardner obviously didn't spot that, instead taking it as an example of the kind of specul
ation that he disliked in the rest of Gribbin's book (and in Gribbin's and Stephen Plagemann's earlier, definitely attackable book The Jupiter Effect). In the postscript to the review he cites Gribbin's remarkably friendly follow-up letter pointing out gently that Gardner had, well, missed the joke. Gardner's response to this letter is astonishing, and does not burnish his reputation much; it's very much a huffy "well, he would say that, wouldn't he?" diatribe. Gardner then goes on to attack a different Gribbin book, Timewarps (1979), as if its many flaws somehow bolstered Gardner's floundering argument that he hadn't, for once, been hoist by his own hyper-sceptical petard.

  I've gone on at length about this single example not because it's desperately important in itself but because it symptomatizes the suspicion that Gardner can become just as obsessively tunnel-visioned in the zeal to prove his case as any pseudoscientist blinded by conviction to any contrary evidence.

  Elsewhere among the many outraged letters quoted in these postscripts we see frequent examples of his correspondents' inability to understand the nature of science. For example, in the case of one telepathy experiment Gardner points out that it would have been possible for a confederate to have seen how the Zener cards were turning by standing on a chair in a corridor outside the experimenter's room and watching through a fanlight. Now, Gardner's point was not that this did happen but that it could have – and the very fact that it could have, or that something like it could have, destroys the validity of the supposedly scientific experiment. That is, it is not proof that there was no telepathy involved; it merely shows that the experiment, likewise, has not proved that there was, despite the experimenters' claims. This sort of refinement is clearly over the heads of many of those who wrote to complain about Gardner's various conclusions.